Manual Cross Tab Dynamic Crystal Report

Lately I’m been involve in a lot of crystal reports and one of them is a cross-tab dynamic report which will grow vertically and horizontally. There are a lot of ways to do it. And I think the most easiest way is to use the cross-tab function in the Crystal report which directly pump in all your data and let the crystal report do the rest. Unfortunately, it is too late for me to realized there is such function to use, and I used the way of coding which will faced some challenges in the midst of preparing the format of data before putting it into crystal report and display it.

OK. Here is just something to share for those who wanna use such method to display your data. This is what I’ve done, and may not be the most efficient way to do. Btw, I’m using MVC c# and nHibernate for this case.

Below is the View in my database, which you can see where the report will be display according to do order ValueDate, BrokerName, and TradePLCcyCode.

data in database

And Below is the Crystal report format where data will be populated into and be display. I have created a sub report for this to make ease if next time there is a need of adding new extra report to this report. And the below diagram shows the section where data will be displayed. I have fix it to 10 rows for Currency, 6 Columns for Broker and Total. And yeah, it is group by ValueDate. These fields are also define in my dataset file(.xsd).

crystal reportsubreport

Now, we go to the coding part. Before I pump in my data from view to the report, I have to convert all the data from view into a datatable before assigning them row by row into an object. Below is the datatable generated from the view where all data are populated into. As you can see there are different ValueDate which we have to group them later.

datatable

Now is the challenging part where I have to split this ‘huge’ datatable into sections of smaller datatable to be displayed. So What I’ve done is, firstly I split it by ValueDate. It depends on how many ValueDate in my datatable.

split by value date

Above code split the ‘huge’ datatable into smaller lists of datatables with different ValueDate. And from here, I will loop through the number of distinct ValueDate. However, the rows and columns may exceed what I’ve set in the Crystal report, so I have to split these smaller lists of datatables into the sections that fit in the report.

How to know how many section for my rows and columns? As above, I have set 6 rows and 10 columns. So a loop function is use to loop through the ‘huge’ datatable to do the following process:

1. splitting it into smaller datatables. It will split by rows then by columns.

E.g. table is 12 X 20, it will split into 4 smaller tables.

table is 12 X 10, it will split into 2 smaller tables.

2. assigning each smaller datatables in an object.

3. assigning all objects into a list of object.

After that, will pass this list of object into the crystal report to be print.